With unprecedented circumstances comes unpredictable demand, changes in customer behavior, finding new ways of working, and the need to meet new demands. Companies that have adopted cloud computing and have a scalable architecture in place for their core business systems saw little disruption with COVID-19 despite this unanticipated change.

Scalability enables businesses to meet the needs of their customers seamlessly, even when a sudden change in capacity occurs. IT makes this level of scalability possible by creating an infrastructure that can adapt to a spike or drop in transactions. Many use cloud computing to enable flexibility and accessibility for their IT architecture.

#1 WatchBox

WatchBox is the world’s leading platform for pre-owned luxury watches. By the end of 2019, WatchBox launched its digital platform on Commerce Cloud across five global locations, a flagship brick and mortar store in Dubai, and enabled an in-store mobile application as well as a blockchain-backed digital voucher application. Following this, WatchBox made a focused effort to unveil a global unified desktop ecosystem for the business to operate under one single platform. It was critical for the company that customers had a consistent digital experience in-store and on its eCommerce channel. When COVID-19 started to impact the global economy, the company needed to pivot quickly from having omnichannel experiences to online-only experiences for its customers. Shri Ballal, CTO of WatchBox, says the scalability and the availability of its cloud ecosystem played a significant role in meeting the new needs of its customers.

“Our decision to take on digital transformation with a connected cloud architecture under Salesforce as a cloud ecosystem, of which MuleSoft is an integral part, was the best decision we took before the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Shri Ballal, CTO of WatchBox.

#2 Land O’Lakes

Land O’Lakes is a farmer-owned cooperative; Dairy Foods business unit distributes dozens of dairy products across the U.S. As consumer demands shifted with the COVID-19 pandemic, the demands of Land O’Lakes distributors also fluctuated — creating a potential risk for the organization’s distribution supply chain. However, Land O’Lakes was properly prepared as its infrastructure had the network capacity needed to bring data from its cloud apps into ongoing systems to handle these new integration needs. Sampath Kurra, a Senior IT manager with Land O’Lakes, says that Anypoint Platform enabled Land O’Lakes to deliver a critical supply chain logistic cloud initiative that processes about 50% of overall API transactions; making it possible to scale to meet the needs brought on by COVID-19.

“The nature of the platform allows us to scale easily — by adding more replicas as needed — helping us manage the scale and capacity needed to deliver.”

#3 USDA

The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) is the federal government department that provides leadership on food, agriculture, natural resources, rural development, nutrition, and related issues. Because the USDA is a government agency, there was the potential for several issues to arise when employees had to shift to remote work, such as gaining secure access to critical federal systems and data. However, since the USDA leveraged API-led integration to securely connect its systems and data, the USDA was able to maintain employee operations.

“We’ve really done a good job of building a decentralized system where we can support our offices anywhere in the country or the world. It was easy to extrapolate that to home offices in every city and county in the United States.”

Casey Cook, Enterprise Architect, USDA

#4 Indiana Department of Child Services

The Indiana Department of Child Services leverages MuleSoft and Salesforce for state-wide connectivity across all of its systems. The state is now leveraging reusable APIs it previously created across several departments to ensure safety for its citizens and employees.

When COVID-19 hit, its child welfare and child support teams needed data was from the state’s health department, such as shot and immunization records, to ensure child health safety. Since the state’s infrastructure was already optimized for reuse, the Department of Child Services was able to quickly reuse the APIs already created, unlocking and consuming the necessary data from the Department of Health.

Additionally, the state is using APIs to manage building operations for its 92 office buildings. An API was already built with MuleSoft to the state’s PeopleSoft architecture — with it, the Indiana Department of Child Services can manage employee access to all of its buildings to comply with social distancing policies and ensure that adequate PPE and hand sanitizer was distributed across its offices.

“Within eight hours, my team built a tracking software for all 92 counties to determine who’s in the building, when they check-in and check-out to meet social distancing limits, as well as how much hand sanitizer or how many masks we need.”

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MuleSoft provides the most widely used integration platform for connecting any application, data source or API, whether in the cloud or on-premises. With Anypoint Platform®, MuleSoft delivers a complete integration experience built on proven open source technology, eliminating the pain and cost of point-to-point integration. Anypoint Platform includes CloudHub™ iPaaS, Mule ESB™, and a unified solution for API management™, design and publishing.